The Situation

Bangkok Bank is the largest commercial bank in Thailand and one of the largest regional banks in Southeast Asia, with an international network of 27 branches and one representative office in 13 economies. The bank is a market leader because of its philosophy of developing a long-term supportive partnership with its customers. Bangkok Bank has plans to further expand its regional presence and international services to support Thai companies doing business overseas as well as foreign companies investing in Thailand.

The Challenge

Bangkok Bank requires a platform that will enable it to provide a seamless web experience with quality, speed and security. To uphold its strong customer base, Bangkok Bank must provide superior website performance for every customer, handle high traffic loads during peak seasons and provide reliable 24/7 availability. Growing traffic volume from the bank’s expanding international network, covering China, Hong Kong, the US, the UK, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Laos and Myanmar, was putting a strain on the bank’s infrastructure, causing unpredictable site loading times.

The Goals

Bangkok Bank wanted to meet four key objectives to support its business plans:

Manage traffic growth for the site more effectively:
Bangkok Bank needed a web performance platform that could handle the increase in incoming traffic as it expands throughout the region and globally

Improve website’s overseas performance:
Bangkok Bank required a stable and reliable web experience for end users that would allow them to access the bank’s services from anywhere in the world

Protect the website and mitigate Internet security risks:
Bangkok Bank wanted to provide its end users with a seamless and secure banking experience online

Isolate the public website from transactional websites:
In the prior configuration, unusually high volumes at peak could potentially slow down transactional services. The bank wanted to manage high volumes of peak website traffic and transactional traffic to prevent it from slowing down.

Why Akamai

Scaling Capacity on Demand

As a business planning to grow and expand internationally, Bangkok Bank needed a web performance platform that would handle high volumes of incoming traffic that could otherwise degrade the website. Akamai was able to provide the website with scale and capacity on demand, meeting peak traffic with the power and scale of Akamai Intelligent Platform, offloading at peak, 90.5 percent of its traffic. The Bangkok Bank website gained the ability to handle a peak of 31.083 page views per second without affecting website performance. “We need to ensure that we have the necessary infrastructure and systems in place to handle the increasing flows of website traffic which are increasingly originating from locations outside of Thailand. Akamai’s Intelligent Platform has given us the scalability to handle incoming traffic flows without hindering the website’s performance, which allows us to reach our business goal of providing quality service to more clients across the region.” commented Mr. Gillard.

Delivering Consistent and Quality Content Globally

Among Bangkok Bank’s key competitive strengths are its large customer base,enduring customer relationships and unrivaled regional branch network. The bank is constantly building on these strengths, while working to further improve the efficiency of operations and quality of customer service. With plans to further expand its regional presence and international services to support its customers, Bangkok Bank requires a platform that can manage the delivery of web content to its growing customer base, both locally and globally, while ensuring a quality user experience.

The bank is also aggressively pursuing a digitization program, moving customers and employees to electronic channels connected to the Internet. In 2014 the bank re-launched its Bualuang mBanking channel and this has received an exceptional response from retail customers. These downloadable web applications are rated by customers at over 4 out of 5 in the PLAY and iTUNES App Stores. Due to the exceptional ease of use and convenience of these applications, customers are using them many times more per month than the traditional Internet banking channel. This combination of rich functionality, rapid customer adoption and frequent customer use is generating far higher loads on the bank’s infrastructure than in the past. Moving to Akamai has helped the bank to cope with this rapid increase in usage.

”Our relationship with our valued customers is of utmost importance to us and sets us apart from our competitors. Ensuring that our customers are able to conveniently access information from our website with ease is a crucial part of maintaining these relationships. Akamai’s ability to provide a fast, secure and quality web experience has directly supported our plans to expand our business internationally, ensuring we provide all our customers with seamless and secure access to our banking services,” said Mr. Gillard.

Providing Security Layered above Quality Performance

Akamai enabled the bank to identify excessive Internet traffic demands on its origin server, due to a third-party site in Thailand that was scraping the website for foreign exchange rates. Akamai’s Web Performance Solutions, which manages IP blocking, allowed the bank to eliminate the third-party site from its origin server. This ensured that the Bangkok Bank website was handling only legitimate requests from customers, providing a better web experience and increased speed.

“As a financial institution that stores and processes client’s private information, it is paramount that we are able to protect the information that our clients have entrusted to us. In this day and age when cyber security is a real concern for every individual, our worries were put at ease with Akamai’s capabilities in store, blocking out any unwanted traffic and lowering the risk of a cyber attack,” concluded Mr. Gillard.

About Bangkok Bank Public Company Limited

Established in 1944, Bangkok Bank is the largest commercial bank in Thailand and one of the largest regional banks in Southeast Asia, with total assets of approximately US$80 billion. Bangkok Bank is Thailand’s market leader in corporate and SME banking and has the country’s largest retail customer base, as well as an extensive international network of 27 branches and one representative office spanning 13 economies. The bank’s thriving self-service network, including ATMs and cash deposit machines, phone banking, and a convenient easy-to-use bilingual internet banking service, enables customers to do fast, round-the-clock banking.

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